Social Relationships:

Primary profession or occupation:

Housekeeper, Factory worker, Farmer, Housewife, Invalid

Important dates:

1937/--/-- went to Richmond, Indiana and began working as a domestic servant.
1942/--/-- began work in a factory in Richmond, Indiana
1950/01/-- moved into new home near Albany, Kentucky and had seizures.
1974/--/-- multiple sclerosis caused loss of ability to walk. Confined to a wheel chair.
1987/09/-- hospitalized for bed sores and spent the rest of her life in nursing homes
1988/04/30 admitted to Master's Health Care Center in Algood, TN where she spent the rest of her life making latch hooks.

Notes:

Nora Lafever and her twin sister, Dora, had six older brothers and sisters
and four who where younger than them. It was difficult living on a Tennessee
farm in the middle of the great depression. Nora's older brothers, Charlie
and Herschel, had gone to Indiana to find work and ended up as farm hands for
a farmer named Weaver. When Mr. Weaver needed a housekeeper they suggested
their younger sister, Nora, and sent for her to come to Indiana. This was
1937 and Nora was fifteen years old. By the time she was twenty she had
worked as a housekeeper for the Weavers and a nannie for Madge Reid, a school
teacher in Richmond who had two children, and then worked at Perfect Circle
making piston rings. By then her older sisters, Myrtle and Ada, were married
and Ada and her husband, Amon, were living in Michigan and Myrtle and her
husband, Hose, lived on a farm in southern Tennessee. Her sisters, Dora and
Lorene, had also come North looking for work. Lorene stayed with Nora for a
while and worked with her at Perfect Circle. Then Lorene moved on to Michigan
and probably stayed with Ada and worked there. Eventually she married and
moved back to Tennessee to live on a farm with her husband, Claborn, and work
in a garment factory.
In 1942 both Nora and Dora married.
In 1943 Ada had returned from Michigan to her and Amon's small farm in
Tennessee and Nora's new husband, Jesse, had been sent overseas in the Army to
fight in the Pacific theatre. Ada was pregnant with her second daughter so
Nora stayed with her for a while on the farm to help out. By 1944 Ada had her
baby and Amon returned to Tennessee to live for a while on the farm. Nora
returned to Richmond, Indiana and worked at Belden making wire and when
Jesse's unit was returned to the states temporarily to an army base in Spokane
Washington, she and another army wife drove a 1939 Buick she had purchased
from Indiana to Washington where they stayed for a week or two with their
husbands.
In early 1945 the war was over and Jesse returned to Richmond to work at
Belden with Nora. In 1947 Nora had her first child, a son she named Roy
Duane. Later that year her brother, Kenneth, returned from his Army duty in
the occupation of Germany and came to Richmond looking for factory work. He
stayed with Jesse and Nora and the new baby at first but soon bought an
apartment house and moved into the attic of it so he could rent out all four
apartments.
In 1949 Jesse's grandfather, Dr. Samuel W. Bristow, sold Jesse a farm near
Albany in southern Kentucky and asked him to move there to help take care of
him and his wife, Jesse's grandmother, Ellen, as they aged. So Jesse and
Nora, who was again pregnant, and their son moved to Albany and stayed with
the doctor and his wife while they built a house on the farm where they could
live. In January 1950 they had moved into the house on the farm and Nora gave
birth there to a daughter, Karen. During or after the birth she had a seizure
and she continued having occasional seizures for the next thirty years.
Eventually she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. By the early 1970s she
was unable to walk and had to use a wheel chair for the rest of her life. She
worked hard with Jesse on the farm as long as she could.
In 1975 Jesse died from lung cancer and Karen, who had been teaching school in
eastern Kentucky, returned to the farm to care for her mother. In 1979 Duane
who was a forester returned to the farm and built a house there and Karen
married and left. By the late 1980s, Nora had to go to a nursing home and
eventually due to diabetes, both legs were amputated. She died in a nursing
home near Cookeville, Tennessee in 1994.